Three girls movie

Three girls movie is a genre of film which typical centers around the activities, both romantic and professional, of three (sometimes four) girls, usually in an urban setting. According to Laura Jacobs in Vanity Fair, "Requirements were minimal: a big city, three pretty faces, some wolves." It is also known as three girls in the city movies.

According to Ann Hornaday of the Washington Post the genre has been one of Hollywood's most successful since the 1920s:

The theme... has been an unusually enduring and lucrative one, exploiting each succeeding era's anxieties surrounding women's changing roles and helping define those eras' new ideas of modern life. In them, audiences can watch women negotiate and sometimes subvert the forces that limn and limit their choices. And each offers its mostly female audience the delectable cake-and-eat-it proposition of a morality tale served with plenty of vicarious vice -- and extravagant dollops of yummy fashion. Most often, it came down to the same questions: To give in to lust or wait for love? To cash in on one's sexuality or remain pure? To marry or to pursue a career? (By Hollywood's rules, they're almost always mutually exclusive.)

Jacobs argued that four girls "is fine for TV... but one too many for film... Three is destiny. When blushing brides play with matches, one girl wins, one draws, one dies." However a number of "three girls" movies have successfully featured four.

Many of the films are set in Manhattan "with its vertiginous skyline, its liberating streets, its steady supply of cads and clothes, its lures and snares of self-invention, what it meant to be a woman could be worked out -- in relationships with men, with work, and even with architecture, but mostly with friends" (Hornaday).

History

The genre arguably started in 1925 with Sally, Irene and Mary and included many early Joan Crawford films. In the 1930s it could be seen with films such as Three on Match (1932). However "Throughout the 30s and into the 40s, three-girls-in-the-city had to make room for three-boys-back-from-war."

In the 1950s the genre revived in popularity with the success of How to Marry a Millionaire and Three Coins in the Fountain. Vanity Fair called director Jean Negulesco the "crown prince of the three-girl movie".

In the 1970s New World Pictures made a number of three girl films about nurses and teachers including The Student Nurses. (Sometimes there were four girls). These were more male focused. According to Jonathan Kaplan, Roger Corman described the formula as "Exploitation of male sexual fantasy, a comedic subplot, action and violence, and a slightly-to-the-left-of-center social subplot. And these were the four elements that were required in the nurses pictures," said Kaplan. For nurse films, the director says Corman "explained that there would be three nurses: a blonde, a brunette, and a nurse of colour; that the nurse of color would be involved in a political subplot, the brunette would be involved in the kinky subplot, and the blonde would be the comedy subplot

Sex and the City is a more recent incantation of the genre. According to the Washington Post "no one will accuse Sex and the City of revolutionizing the three-girls picture. But it still resuscitates a genre that, at its best, articulates something essential about womanhood, its unspoken contradictions and ambivalences, its double standards and hypocrisies, and the joys and sometimes life-or-death necessity of friendship among women."

Key films

• Sally, Irene and Mary (1925)
• How to Marry a Millionaire (1953)
• Three Coins in the Fountain (1954)
• The Best of Everything (1959)
• Where the Boys Are (1960)
• The Pleasure Seekers (1964)
• The Student Nurses (1970)
• Sex and the City (2008)